July 01, 1996,Issue: 617Section: Top Of The
News Emerging Technologies -- Car Pooling on the
InternetEvan Schuman

East Lansing, Mich. Little in this university town is not affected by
the automotive industry. So it might seem ironic that a pre-press business
is pushing the use of cable modems to reduce time and money spent on
automotive transportation.

But that's precisely one of the main advantages seen by William Ray,
president of Group InfoTech, who is using cable modems as an alternative
not to T1 lines or ISDN, but rather to overnight delivery services and to
clients driving artwork to and from InfoTech's headquarters here. InfoTech
creates glossy brochures and advertisements for a mostly local client
base.

"When [clients] come over, they've wasted that time," Ray says. "It's
much easier if they can just stay in their office and drag 'n drop."

InfoTech's cable modem application, made possible under a test being
conducted by Tele-Communications Inc., Englewood, Colo., using LANCity
modems, uses the Internet as the connection medium between cable modems
installed at InfoTech headquarters and a handful of client sites.

The biggest advantage Ray sees for his $15 million, 60-employee
business is a leg up against larger but less technologically sophisticated
competitors.

"We have a huge film capacity, but we don't have the proximity" to the
largest potential clients in advertising centers such as New York or Los
Angeles. "But if customers can just send it over the Internet," InfoTech
is on a more even competitive footing, he says.

Eliminating a Step

The process of generating and revising art involves several steps,
including making images into film. By transferring images over the
Internet via cable, "we can eliminate the intermediate step of making and
proofing the films" because they are transmitted digitally, he says.

Moreover, the Internet frees InfoTech from the incompatibilities that
exist between various cable companies: A lack of standards prevents users
in the jurisdiction of one cable company from communicating end to end via
cable with users in the jurisdiction of another cable company.

This is why many companies are viewing cable networks as purely for LAN
or Metropolitan Area Network deployment. But if a user is willing to use
the Internet as its communications network, cable modems will connect
sites across the country using the tried-and-true IP protocol.

Concerns

Use of the Internet to link cable modem sites puts InfoTech in the
minority of the early commercial deployment of cable modems, mostly
because of speed, security and reliability concerns associated with the
Internet. InfoTech weighed these issues, but decided they were secondary
when compared to the benefits of potential national use.

As to the speed delays, Ray says his employees' concerns mostly involve
moving data into and out of their systems as quickly as possible, which
the cable modems do. In between those two steps, whether it's a few
seconds or several minutes, doesn't make that much of a difference to
InfoTech.

"Fifteen minutes doesn't mean anything. The issue usually is, 'Can we
get it done by tomorrow?' " Ray explains. "The issue is days, not hours,
and certainly not minutes."

InfoTech connects to the Internet through neighboring Michigan State
University, which provides multiple T1s to the Internet backbone.
Therefore, throughput can never exceed the 1.544 megabits per second
available on a T1 line, despite the cable modems' ability to transmit at
raw speeds up to 60 Mbps.

A typical file transmitted by InfoTech is roughly 30 megabytes in size,
which takes approximately seven minutes with the current Internet
connections, Ray says.

Far more problematic than the available bandwidth is that the
university is home to 43,000 faculty and students who have taxed the T1
lines to their limit.

'It's Just Overload'

The Internet connection "wasn't meant to support that many people that
quickly. It's just overload," says Mike Holcomb, InfoTech's chief
technical-support person, adding that the Internet, in general, is "not
highly reliable."

In terms of security, if anything happens to a critical image while
it's being sent, the image can easily be re-sent, Ray says. And there are
checks in place to prevent alterations from going undetected, he says.

Another concern of using the Internet is reliability. The cable
connections in use for the trial in East Lansing are preliminary, making
their reliability spotty.

Holcomb, however, takes a pragmatic approach, saying he doesn't get too
concerned about periodic outages or unforseen contingencies. "There's not
a better alternative," he says. "When it does function, it functions
incredibly well."